Now I'm going to read a time-travel poem.
And it all started because of that comment,
because it took a very long time for my mother
to forgive me for being gay.
And it happened because she found out
that my lover is white.
And so I wrote these time machine poems,
and the machine I use is not like a TARDIS,
or like a DeLorean, but it is a white boy.
"White Boy Time Machine: Instruction Manual."
In the beginning there was corn.
A whole state of boys blonde as the plants surrounding them.
Oh, but why am I here?
It seems important to mention all the things that went wrong.
Once my mother loved a field and fled from the sight
of its singed body.
Once my mother kissed my father, and the corners of his lips
unraveled and a child twice his size came out.
Once the child cried and cried until someone
put something in its mouth.
Near the quarry a population of humming boy machines,
humming love songs and the national anthem,
humming drive in movies and pickup trucks,
humming ball caps and slow dances and pebbles
at your window.
I guess I'm trying to explain what's
happening without leaving.
I took his hand and the geese came back for autumn.
I bit his lip and the ash spat back my grandmother's body.
I rose from his lap and the dirt sunk 100 years.
I laid in his bed and watched everyone fall
into their mothers.
I went back to catch a boy who fell from a tree
and the scars folded back into my knees.
Don't ask me how.
Don't ask if I'm a ghost.
I know.
I know it sounds strange, climbing inside a boy
and crawling out the other end in yesterday's light.
Somewhere, somewhere, a school of metal clad boys.
Somewhere, somewhere, my mother is just a girl.
Somewhere, somewhere, a man hands her a flower
and my eyes flicker blue.